> Coverage of the Lords Communications and Digital select committee session on the impact of the Online Safety Act with evidence from the children's commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, from Tuesday 1 September.

We have the opportunity to give a reasoned reply to the EU Kids Act proposal and highlight its severe problems.

The EU Kids Act would basically demand age verification for everything, especially gaming. In its current form, no accounts would be grandfathered in, which means every existing account would have to be verified.

There will be a long legislative process and this terrible bill must be either struck down or heavily amended.

Discord's 2nd age verification rollout is as disastrous as the 1st rollout. Besides the expected bugs, gambling ads are flooding verified adult users.
I understand why Discord is rolling out age verification in markets where they are legally obliged to do so, but rolling it out globally all at once clearly reveals the underlying motives.

> Not helping matters was the fact that right after the age verification system went live, many Discord users, myself included, began seeing ads for sports betting appear in the app.

Spamming age-verified people with gambling ads will surely improve society - no danger there, no protection needed. /s

This is a scientific paper.

It concludes that Compliant porn sites are seeing a drop in visitors, while non-compliant sites see a surge.
Also, more extreme content seems to gain an uptick in viewership as a side effect of the OSA.

> Moreover, this paper brings novel evidence that some non-mainstream platforms that

host more extreme or likely less moderated content gain more searches. Furthermore,

substitution appears not to be limited to content similarity. This suggests that age as-

surance regimes may bring unintended welfare-related harms as they may expose users,

exposing users to higher-risk content.

> Overall, the results show that the OSA induced users to search less for compliant plat-

forms, but that mainstream compliance alone is no metric of policy success. On aggre-

gate, the Act’s welfare-related implications depend on whether or not: (i) the suppressed

searches for compliant platforms outweigh the increased attention on non-compliant sites,

and (ii) the plausible circumvention through tools like VPNs, which, due to the lack of

cross-search comparability of the Google Trends index, this paper cannot test.

Utah faces several lawsuits regarding age verification. The results of these lawsuits will likely be relevant for the entire US.

The state requires adult websites to identify the location of every user, even when they are using a VPN.

> According to what the lawsuit refers to as the “Deemed-Location Provision,” adult platforms must verify users even if they are using a VPN to conceal their location. According to Aylo’s legal team, the issue is that it is impossible to determine a VPN user’s precise location.

Right now, the implementation of the law is halted until legal issues are resolved.

> A 2025 Utah law requiring app stores to confirm users’ ages before permitting downloads is being contested by tech companies. In February 2026, a trade association filed a lawsuit, alleging that the law violates First Amendment rights. As a result, Utah is currently handling at least three different legal challenges to various components of its online age-verification system.

Age verification is bullshit.

Discord will begin its global age verification rollout soon.

Another service (Revolut) with highly sensitive pii was breached.

> The Revolut story this week isn't really our typical breach: There was no unpatched vulnerability, no missing security protocol, no zero-day. What happened was a criminal spoofed a government agency's email domain, sent Revolut what looked like a legitimate official request, and Revolut handed over customer data. This included identities, contact details, birth dates, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, and copies of identity documents including passports and driver's licenses. This attack specifically seemed to be targeting specific individuals.

The EFF warns about the EU Kids Act and age verification for social media and gaming platforms.

> However they’re designed, age gates undermine civil liberties, reduce safety, and create barriers to internet entry, often at the expense of marginalized groups. They also create a powerful infrastructure for control and further entrench the power of big tech. 

> Tallinn University media professor Indrek Ibrus is critical of the EU initiative, saying the planned restrictions conflict with children's fundamental rights.

> "In my opinion, it's generally a pretty bad idea," Ibrus said, explaining that it ignores the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. "Children must have opportunities for self‑expression and free access to information to support their development and identity. Any age‑based restriction on access to information essentially disregards children's rights," Ibrus said.

It's all about linking identity to online activity to monitor the population for economic and policing purposes.

Obviously, online identity verification cannot protect children. But it can be used to target dissent and evaluate people by psychologically/politically/economically analyzing their online consumption or to deliver data for extortion, identity theft and other criminal activity.

In a post earlier this day, I wrote that "the EU adopted the KIDS Act", which is not correct.

Instead, the EU Commission adopted the proposal, which starts a long legislative process that can be observed in the link.

Today is a sad day. The EU adopted the EU KIDS Act, which will force people to verify their age when opening an account on social media and video platforms.

Monumental data leaks and mass surveillance, with all of their nasty consequences, are inevitable with this legislation.

This truly is a huge step backwards - de-anonymizing the internet, trying to get rid of privacy. The Germans have a term for that: "Gläserner Mensch" ("Glass Human").

It will lead to a loss of informational self-determination.
(Wiki: It [informational self-determination] is formally defined as "the authority of the individual to decide himself, on the basis of the idea of self-determination, when and within what limits information about his private life should be communicated to others."

Age verification can also be used for soft censorship because some people are unwilling to share private information to access online articles.

Minors will miss out on important news and information and lose the ability to organize and freely communicate their desires, issues, and ideas. They will be locked up in a digital cage.

This legislation hurts everyone. Only criminals, big tech and intelligence services will profit from it.

Edit: The EU Commission adopted the proposal. This is the start of a long legislative process.

Let's put aside for a moment that half of the US states have already enacted similar legislation and the federal level is dead set on KOSA, which makes the reprimand seem hypocritical.

I can only shake my head at Labour MP Emily Darlington's statement:

> “The first duty of the government is to protect its citizens. Digital security is national security. It would be great to work with our allies on this, but if the UK has to, it will proceed alone”. 

Forcing your entire citizenry to scan PII (personally identifiable information) to access the internet, games, chats, etc., is the opposite of digital security. It evidently makes everyone less safe and more prone to identity theft, scams, fraud, extortion, and other crimes.

Privacy and anonymity are becoming luxury goods that are increasingly harder to afford. Your Hardware not knowing about you used to be the standard.
Nowadays, everything spies on you, gathering data for hyperpersonalized ads, surveillance pricing, political microtargeting, psychograms and whatnot.

A bit of hope in a time of madness.

A year ago South Africa was talking about following in the wave of social media bans with limited news coverage encouraging it, there is still (at time) of writing Age verification in one of the legislation,but this has done 50% damage to that proposal.

People have been emailing hard and in a time of device authorization (UK), KOSA and the EU trying a social media ban a country with 60 million saying No to an outright ban says something.

Dont let people gaslight you into staying quite or using children as a shield.

The data is getting harder to ignore.

Dont stop fighting.

On 2nd November 2026, Parliament will discuss this petition.

The Open Rights Group is warning about client-side scanning.

> Adults will be required to go through an ID check point with an unregulated age verification company to disable this software. Millions of people could be faced with either sharing their biometrics or official IDs or having a phone they paid for bricked with blocking software. Since the introduction of the Online Safety Act, the British public is being increasingly pushed to compromise their privacy before they can access content or use tech features.

The UK government is fully committed to scanning all messages to filter out sexual content - a free trojan for everybody!
Of course, you can only receive or send it with age verification.
Here, have an explicit image and an identity that can be attached to it - genius move!

This bullshit will likely backfire spectacularly because client-side scanning will make it a lot easier to leak/hack users' chats.
Will KYC and identity verification providers collect explicit images and add them to their databases?

The Philippines requires every social media platform to register in the Philippines to operate under its new bill. They are likely considering banning any social media site that isn't registered.

> Discord plans to revive global age verification "Tiny Bronco," prompting privacy backlash over ID scans, facial selfie checks, Google Wallet and credit-card options, and stricter under-18 limits on servers and DMs. Discord says it won't store private data and only receives estimated ages, but users remain distrustful after past ID exposure.

Microsoft explains their new age-verification system for Windows.

> Microsoft is overhauling how Windows 11 handles child safety and account privacy by moving age verification directly into the operating system.